


Five Things Jones and Cruz Learned About Neal Caffrey

by hoosierbitch



Category: White Collar
Genre: 5 Things, Drama, Friendship, Multi, POV Outsider, Porn, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-28
Updated: 2010-02-28
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:20:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Jones or Cruz learned something unexpected about Neal. <strong></strong></p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Jones and Cruz Learned About Neal Caffrey

**one: he liked bad puns**  
  
Lauren Cruz did not like Neal Caffrey. No way, no how, no chance. She'd done her thesis on him, yes, but because she wanted to stop other people like him, not because she was a fan of his work. No matter how often Neal laughingly taunted her with claims of hero-worship. She did not admire his style (which was out-of-date and inappropriate for the office), his skill with women (he was pretty, not Casanova), or his intelligence - because he was the enemy. He wasn't funny, or sweet, or cute. He was a con man.

Slowly, as she got more comfortable within the unit, Neal stopped hitting on her. Sure, he still complimented her hair and clothes and smile, but since he did that to Jones, too, she figured it was more defense mechanism than affection. Hopefully, he was afraid of them. So of course the first case where Peter told her that she was in charge (a minor fraud case, with Peter at her shoulder every other second), it was Neal she had to apologize to when she screwed up.

She was sitting in the conference room with Jones and Neal, poring through brain-numbing stacks of financial records. And Neal was the first one to have a breakthrough, which, quite frankly, _infuriated_ her. The man had no official training - he probably hadn't even gone to _college_, for God's sake, when she and Jones and Burke had worked their _asses_ off to get to where they were.

She'd stayed up late every night that week and showed up early every morning, so when Neal announced his epiphany with a loud "aha!" (because he was a caricature of a person who actually said things like _'aha'_) she was already pissed off. "They're welfare office codes! Look, you can see that state codes, here, individual office IDs here - he's actually laundering his stolen government money through the government-run welfare system. You've got to admire the man's sense of humor, if not his methods - "

"I don't admire anything about a person who would manipulate a system that's only there to help people," she said, with an especially cutting glare for Neal. "And how did you know what codes those were?"

"Inside knowledge of the system," he said cryptically.

She snorted and looked to Jones for support, but he just shrugged. "I thought you were a classier kind of criminal, Caffrey. I can't believe you'd stoop to stealing from people too poor to protect themselves. They're not - not museums, they don't have insurance on the money you take from them! You're stealing from people who can't even afford to_ feed_ themselves!" Neal offered no defense, just stared down at the papers in front of him.

She gathered up her files and went to tell Agent Burke about their findings. He was less than impressed by the conclusions she'd drawn.

"And how did Neal know about those codes, Agent Cruz?" She got a thrill every time someone called her 'Agent Cruz,' but this time the pleasure was somewhat dimmed by the reproach in his voice.

"I - I assumed he had run a similar scam at some point in his past."

"Was there anything in his file to indicate that fact?"

"No," she said, and then (because she thought sometimes Peter's affection clouded his judgement, he shouldn't be defending Neal's actions to her,) she continued. "But he's a criminal, Agent Burke. He's run every other kind of scam you could think of - "

"What is in his file, Agent Cruz?"

"Information and evidence on more suspected crimes than I can count, sir."

"What is there on Caffrey before his seventeenth birthday in that file?"

"Nothing," she said, remembering those blank pages with frustration.

"Do you think it's at all possible, Agent Cruz," and now it was definitely a hairsbreadth away from an insult, "that perhaps his knowledge of the welfare system stems from some other kind of experience?"

She blinked, and thought of the blank look on Caffrey's face, the shame when she'd accused him of stealing from - from people too poor to feed themselves. She thought of the uncomfortable expression on Jones' face, and buried her face in her hands. "Shit. Yes. Yes, sir, that's very possible."

He gave her the files back, and gave her a big smile. "It's your case, Lauren. So it's your responsibility to fix your own mistakes."

He wasn't in the conference room, or the break room. Ophelia, whose desk was next to Neal's said she thought he might have headed down to the stacks. Sure enough, he was squirreled away in a back aisle - and she had to bite down on the urge to demand to know what file he was looking at, what information he was gathering, what job he was plotting. He already looked trapped.

"Caffrey," she asked. "Do I owe you an apology?"

He smirked. "For not letting me take you out to dinner? Well, since you're the one missing out - "

"Neal. Could you can the act for, like, a _minute_?"

"It's not an act," he said. "Some of us are just born fabulous. It's a curse, more than a gift - "

"Seriously! Caffrey: were you on welfare?"

When his eyes meet hers without a hint of humor in them, the blue colder than she'd thought they could get, she wished she'd kept her mouth shut and just bought the man a muffin basket.

"Peter tell you to apologize?" And his voice was silky, he was moving closer to her, like a predator - she wanted to move away but reminded herself that she was carrying a firearm, and Neal was basically a glorified gigolo. "He give you some talk about assumptions, and what they make you?" He didn't touch her. Just stepped close enough that every inch of her exposed skin buzzed with anticipation. "An ass, Agent Cruz. It makes you an ass." The title had definitely lost whatever shine it had left. Neal walked away and she closed her eyes. _Agent Lauren Maria Cruz_, she told herself: _your mama would not be proud of you right now_.

 

**two: his favorite artist**  
  
"Peter's not going to leave me in there this time, right?" Neal asked him as bare fields blurred past the windows of the bus. Jones' officer's uniform was uncomfortable, while Neal was somehow managing to make neon orange look downright fashionable.

"Are you kidding? Of course he wouldn't do that," Jones assured him, trying to look serious in case the driver caught a glimpse of them in the rearview. He shifted his grip on his nightstick and tried to make it look natural.

Neal nodded, but his hands, lonely without his fedora, continued to play with the chains of his cuffs while his eyes shifted nervously around the bus. Jones thought there was a language to Caffrey’s eyelids. Like how dancers in Japan waved their fans, Neal was fluttering and shuttering away, blinking cryptic messages in Morse code. He thought Peter had probably decoded him years ago.

"Peter's not going to leave me there," Neal repeated before his grin faded, miles passing by, his hands pausing. “He left me in prison for six months after I went after Kate, you know. Two months past my original release date.” He looked out the window at empty New York farmland, and even Jones could speak that language.

Jones hadn't been on the team for the initial chase. Diana had been, right at the beginning of her probationary period, before her medical leave which extended her stay with the unit. She'd told him fantastic stories about the con artist who'd ordered pizza for the agents trailing him with all of their favorite toppings. And the time he'd thrown a surprise party for the team who'd been chasing him through Wales. And the notes he'd left for Peter, hidden in the weave of the newspaper delivered to his house. (_Brilliant,_ she'd said, _and fun. __Peter's crazy about him_.)

He might not have been there from the start (_of Peter and Neal's epic love story_, if you heard it according to Diana) but he had been the one to look through the cell after Neal's escape. Peter was busy scrutinizing the security tapes and chasing after Ms. Moreau, so Jones boxed up Neal's clothes and blankets, the sketches on his walls, the cassette player. He took pictures of the tick marks on the wall, one for each day behind bars that he owed to Peter Burke. They could be evidence. Code in the changing colors, maybe.

When he got back to the office the first thing he did was compare the sketches Neal had drawn to da Vinci's. They were - perfect. The color, lines, angles, even the size was exact. But pictures of the original sketches weren't included in any of the books Neal had squirreled away. The cons weren't allowed internet access and there were no art books in the library - he checked through the list of goods Neal'd received during his three-and-a-half year incarceration, and finds only pens, paper, and stationary listed. He must have drawn them from memory.

He thought of the cell he'd emptied, cataloged, and packed away. How bare it must have been upon Neal's return. He wondered if Neal had started to decorate it again in those six months when he hadn't known Peter was coming back for him.  "There was a lot of paperwork," Jones tried to explain, but in truth the decision hadn't been made until a week after his scheduled release. When Ghovat had made another move and the unit hadn't been able to follow it. "Peter had to fill out about a mountain of forms for you. Probably took out a good quarter of a jungle.”

“You mean the FBI hasn’t gone green yet? I’m disappointed,” Neal said. It wasn't his best comeback by far, but then again, given the way his hands started to shake when the prison came into view, it was better than honesty.

"You don't have to do this," Jones said, because for anyone else in the FBI it would have been true.

"If I don't," Neal said quietly, "then I'll be sent back there for good." He took a deep breath and smiled at Jones. "Plus, this way you and I get to hang out. And let me tell you, Clinton, you make that uniform look _good._"

Jones forced himself to laugh and pretended not to notice Neal silently mouthing the words, _Peter's not going to leave me here,_ as they pulled into the yard.

That night when he made the rounds, he stopped at Neal's cell. He held out some paper and a pen. "Here. I know you, uh, you used to sketch. A lot. Especially da Vinci, right?"

"Yeah," Neal said, in a dazed voice. "I know it's unoriginal, but - he's my favorite." Jones nodded and Neal took the supplies in his elegant hands.

"Don't waste the charcoal putting marks on the wall," Jones told him, which made Neal stare at him uncomfortably. "You won't be here long enough for it to matter."

When they cracked the case and Peter came to collect them, Neal slipped a sketch into Jones' pocket, so deftly he didn't notice until he undressed later that night. He'd signed it with da Vinci's name (perfectly, of course), but on the back he'd written, in simple block letters: _'thank you.'_

 

**three: his birthday**  
  
Neal got shot three months after his one-year anniversary with the bureau. He'd said it was a birthday, of a sort, and he'd thrown himself a party: baked a cake, brought handmade pointy hats, and the rest of the team had suffered through it good-naturedly while Neal beamed at them and piled more devil's food cake onto their paper plates.

But that was eighty-nine days ago, Neal told her as he bled through her suit jacket, shivering in the freezer they'd been locked in. She bunched the fabric up again and pressed it harder. His breath hitched, every exhale clouding in the frigid air. "I think," he says, "that I didn't put enough powdered sugar in the icing." He laughed and a little bit of blood smeared on his lips. She stroked her free hand through his hair (after wiping his blood off on her slacks) and told him not to talk. "Tell me a story, then," he said, and he was trying to joke but his eyes were too wide, his voice too weak, the red of his lips obscene against the pallor of his skin.

"My parents," she said, voice falling into a familiar cadence, "fell in love under a full moon. My mother was dating another man, but when she saw my father - across a room, spilling punch on himself - she said to herself, 'I'm going to marry that man.' And she broke up with her fiance right then and there. But papa was already with someone. A woman he loved very much. So my mother waited for four years for him. They wrote each other letters, and met a few times in between, and when he was single again she was waiting for him. She was very spiritual, said they had to wait until the moon waned. And when it was just a sliver in the sky, he got off the train in her tiny little town and she looked at him and thought to herself 'I'm going to marry that man.' They went to the church the next day, and my brother was born nine months later.

"When I was in high school, they got scammed. Some asshole with a pyramid scheme and a phone-book, and they fell for it. Hook, line, and life savings."

"What was it like," Neal asked, and she remembered the years of her parents yelling at each other, blaming each other, the absolute relief when her scholarship had come through and she'd escaped.

"What was what like?"

"Your - parents," he coughed and she held him as best she could. "Oh, fuck. I'm - I am dying, right?"

"Maybe," she said, because her mama had told her not to lie to anyone on their deathbed.

"Lauren," (and she couldn't remember him calling her by her first name before, not like this) "they loved you? Your parents. What was that like?"

And she knew he was bleeding out. Her legs were wet with his chilled blood, she knew what the wet coughs that wracked his body meant. He was afraid and in pain and dying, and because he did not have love of his own to keep him warm, he'd asked her to tell him a story.

"It's like having a support network around you all the time. Like no matter what I did, I couldn't stop them from loving me. Didn't matter if I lost all my softball games, or didn't get into Yale, or dated shitty guys - even if they disagreed with me, they loved me. They'd support me. I miss them," she said, and realized that the cold was really getting to her and Neal might not be the only one to die in that tiny room. The soaked jacket in her hands was the only warm thing there. "Hey," she wondered. "Why didn't you tell me when you had your birthday? I mean instead of just a party for your anniversary? You could have gotten presents, Neal! When was your birthday?"

"You read my file, didn't you?" He choked out. "For your thesis. You know about the - " he gasped, and she wiped up the blood on his chin. "You know I don't have that information."

"That - nothing like that was in your file," she said awkwardly.

"Really? Huh. Well, I don't know when it is," he said. "They - they gave you a date, if you came in without one. I remembered - I thought I remembered a birthday party in summertime, so they gave me June 7th." He shrugged and she soothed him through the agony he inadvertently caused himself. The fingers she was running through his hair were numb. "Feels like lying," he said. "Having birthday parties."

"I liked the icing on the devil's food cake," she said, right before Peter blew up the door.'

In the hospital Jones took her into the bathroom and helped her wash her hands, change into a set of scrubs, and held her when she broke down and cried.

*

She enlisted Elizabeth's assistance, and on June 8th they threw Neal Caffrey a totally awesome birthday party. Well - there was no pool full of champagne, no nude models, and no ice sculptues, so she'd been a bit worried he'd find it boring - but he just sat on the Burke's couch, absolutely stunned, one hand to the bandage under his shirt and the other over his mouth.

Peter'd gotten him a hat-rack, Jones got him a gift-card for his favorite restaurant and some art history book that made Neal's eyes go soft, and she gave him a framed photo of the team that Elle'd taken when Peter'd received a citation for bravery. He'd been so - surprised. Just sort of gaped at the presents until Peter elbowed him and told him to close his mouth unless he wanted to start catching flies. He'd opened each gift so painstakingly carefully that they'd all made fun of him for it. He'd carefully peeled each piece of tape, unfolded the cheap wrapping, kept it all next to him on the couch like it was precious.

When she and Clinton left to carpool back to their apartment complexes, Jones wrapped a friendly arm over her shoulder and told her she'd done good. She hoped Neal realized what a wonderful family he had now.

 

**four: his least favorite american author**  
  
Six months before his sentence was over, Neal went to Jones for career advice. He started by asking about Jones' last girlfriend, then chatted about a new show on Broadway that Peter wouldn't let him off his anklet to see, even though Elizabeth had been dying to go, and why Peter was cruel but not unusual - then he asked about the academy. About the classes and training and probationary period. Jones, who at that point was used to feeding Neal information until his brain reorganized it into something else, just talked until Neal got to his point.

"Do you know if there are any loopholes around the background requirements?"

Jones frowned. "It's not like you're going to be able to hide your criminal background, Neal. They'll probably view it as an asset, anyway."

"Yeah, but - never mind." He gave Jones a quick wave and started to leave.

"Neal." He stopped. "The bureau would be lucky to have you. You'd be an asset to whatever team you ended up with." Neal grinned at him, but after years of watching him flirt with Cruz, Jones could recognize when he was faking. "So what's the problem?

"You're going to laugh." 

"I won't."

"No, really, it's very funny! I don't meet the education requirements." He gave a short, forced laugh but shot a quick glance at Jones, who hadn't so much as grinned.

Jones was an Ivy league grad himself, and he'd be the first (well, second after Peter) to vouch for Neal's intelligence. "I'm sure they'll take 'school of hard knocks' as a substitute for Harvard in your case. They want your experience, not your degree."

"Yeah, there's some precedent for that. But, uh - I don't actually have a high school diploma." He plastered on a thin smile. "I dropped out in the tenth grade. I decided moving to New York would be a - a better allocation of my resources, as it were."

"Right," Jones said, trying his best not to imagine a young, bright-eyed Neal Caffrey alone (or, god forbid, _not_ alone) on the streets of New York. "I don't know what the policy would be for that." Neal nodded, thanked him with a graceful nod of his fedora, and left before Jones could think of anything to say that wouldn't be pitying or insulting. He thought about the piece of paper framed in his apartment, the straight A's in his file, and the list of cases Neal had almost single-handedly solved.

*

The next week, he asked Peter if he knew what Neal was planning to do after his time was up. Peter - well, Peter blew up at him. Said he didn't know, and if he was so damn interested, to bring it up with Caffrey himself. (_A lover's quarrel_, said his internalized Diana.) He thought about the amount of times Neal's tracking reports listed the Burkes' address, how carefully they danced around each other at work, and thought: they could use a push in the right direction. So he made a call to a friend working in the FBI admissions office, and the next day, slid a GED prep book into Neal's briefcase.

*

A week later Neal waltzed into his office, prep book in one hand, a bag from The Greatest Cake in the other. He pulled out a chocolate croissant and plopped it in front of Jones before perching on the corner of his desk and complaining about cell structures, Hawthorne, and unnecessarily complicated parts of speech. They spend their lunch hours for the next three weeks in a deli down the street, prep book open, ridiculing the easy parts and puzzling out the rest. Neal seemed unduly interested in the scoring policy, but Jones did his best to steer him back to "The Scarlet Letter," which Neal abhorred.

When the test day arrived and Neal's attempts at thanking him started to devolve into an apology for importuning him, he interrupted. "I said that I thought the bureau would be lucky to have you. I wasn't blowing smoke, man. Most of us here, we work here because we want to make the world a better place. We want to protect people." Neal looked away at that, and Jones pointed a finger in his face until he looked back at him. "You have the chance to do a lot of good, Neal. Maybe make up for some of the stuff you did before - " he hesitated - "before Peter." Neal smiled at that, and it was sad and small but real. "You can do this. You can help a lot of people." He shrugged. "And if it doesn't work, you can always go to your back-up plan." Neal looked scandalized. "Baking, you idiot! Not stealing. Christ..." He bit into his pie while Neal laughed.

*

A month later, Neal slipped a copy of his scores onto Jones' desk, personal info whited-out but a smiley face drawn next to the scores. Jones insisted on taking everyone out to dinner for a celebration, even if Cruz, Peter, and Elizabeth stayed oblivious as to the reason. Cruz looked stunning in a tight emerald-blue dress, and Neal, sandwiched between Elle and Peter, looked positively radiant.

 

**five: what he looked like when he came **  
  
This was - not what she'd expected when she went to scrub out the coffee pot with industrial cleaner. She'd expected, when she opened the door to the janitor's supply room to see shelves, and soap, and maybe some toilet paper. Not her boss, Special Agent Peter Burke, holding Neal up and fucking him against the wall.

Neal was moaning loudly enough that they didn't hear the sound of the door clicking open, and she got an eyeful of the muscles in Peter's thighs and shoulders as he thrust forward into Caffrey's ass - she couldn't see Neal's cock, sandwiched between the two of them, but she saw the way his eyes opened when he came, heard the way he gasped. He didn't see her, though. His eyes were wide open and he was looking straight at Peter, the way he always did. Peter kissed him roughly, his lips already swollen, and just kept on fucking up into him. She closed the door carefully as Caffrey starting saying her boss's name in a careful, tender voice.

She caught her breath, licked her lips, and went to see if Jones was free...


End file.
